Rise Again Below Zero

PART ONE

1

You have the right to remain silent. In fact I prefer it. Anything you say would be held against you in a court of law, except there isn’t one. You would have the right to speak to an attorney, but we don’t have those either. There ain’t shit except me. Do you understand?

Danny Adelman had the man facedown against the pavement on the side of the road, his hands bound across his spine with a plastic zip-tie. Her attention was divided, but she’d gotten good at multitasking since things went bad. The zeroes were coming through the tall yellow grass. Slow ones. Moaners. Dozens of them, drawn out into the open by the burning wreckage, preceded by their long, sobbing cries of hunger.

You can’t kill me, he said. You’re a cop.

I didn’t say I was going to kill you, Danny replied. She knew where he got the idea: Her short-nosed shotgun was jammed up under his left ear. I’m only judge and jury here. But the executioner is getting real close.

She and the perpetrator had another minute, at most. Then Danny was going to have to get to the Mustang Special police interceptor and bug out. The black smoke rising up out of the wreckage of the man’s truck was shaped like a giant fist, with one finger pointing down at the scene of the action. The perp wasn’t going to be any more ready to talk than he was now. Time to get down to business.

Tell me something, Danny said.

Fuck you, he answered. He was burly-shouldered, stinking of sweat, his lank hair clinging to his skin in oily strokes. There was a deep, unhealed gash across his forehead.

With patience she did not feel, Danny said, You tried to steal one of our children. Why?

The man barked a laugh. You don’t know? I guess not, if you’re coming from the west. He wrenched his face into a mirthless grimace, trying to smile despite the asphalt against his teeth.

Danny thought about breaking his nose. And you figure not telling me is gonna be satisfaction enough for dying?

Doesn’t matter—you’re going to kill me either way, he said.

Tell me what I want to know and you get your hands back, Danny said. "Even with that busted foot, you can probably make it out of here. Don’t tell me, and I leave you just like you are. Maybe you can still get away, even with handcuffs on. You could last for days."

Fuck you, the man repeated.

And if you say that just one more time, we move on to option three: I break your other foot. You got fifteen seconds.

The perp wasted ten of them weighing the alternatives. Then he said: I was trying to survive, okay? There’s a bounty. One kid buys you passage to the safe place. Got to be under twelve. Lots of people are doing it. Parents are turning in their own.

And what happens to the kids?

They go somewhere else. An even safer place. I hear they’re happy there.

Then why the hell didn’t you just ask nicely?

Danny saw there were tears running out of the man’s red eyes and dripping on the tar.

"Because somebody stole my son, he said. I was taking him there, and this biker gang showed up. Called the Vandal Reapers. And now he’s gone."

The man sobbed. Danny heard the grief, the real agony in his chest, and she knew he was telling the truth. For a few seconds, she listened to the man’s sorrow hacking out of his chest, but the muzzle of her shotgun never wavered, and she did not relieve the weight of her knee upon his back. The nearest of the zeroes was within fifty yards by now. It moaned with renewed urgency as it came closer. A big male.

There was only death in the world now. Living death that could walk and hunt and feast, and barbaric death from outlaws and madmen. Death from the ruins of a shattered civilization. Death from disease and festering wounds. Danny could leave this man to die, or do something to help him. This man whose grief had made him crazy and convinced him to rush one of the Tribe’s caretakers. Whose panic had led him to drop the child he’d grabbed, and drive away at top speed.

Danny’s mind was racing. She was long past compassion for anyone who acted on behalf of chaos, even with the most personal of motives. But another man dead was another feeding for the zeroes. Another pair of hands that could fight back against the dead would be lost forever—or might become one of the enemy.

Get in the fucking car, she said.

2

The police special slewed between the undead that shuffled onto the roadway. They were ragged, dark, indistinct things, like the piers of an abandoned dock revealed by the tide. Skulls with wet rawhide stretched over them, yellow teeth in black, gaping mouths. Eyes that stared out of deep sockets. Pale, lightless eyes. Butcher-shop eyes. They moved like people in pain, stiff-limbed and lurching, twisting around to follow the vehicle. As soon as the last one went by, Danny hit the throttle. Those assholes back at the convoy weren’t answering the radio, probably because Maria, who normally operated the communications system, was the one this escapee had punched when he went for the kid. But once again, the Tribesmen had failed to follow protocol and keep communications open. Danny decided the prisoner’s fate rested on whether Maria was badly injured.

Drink some water, Danny said.

No, her companion in the front seat said. It was a woman’s voice, or nearly so.

You need to drink water or you’ll shrivel up, Danny said and pressed the plastic bottle into the gloved hands beside her.

They were barreling along Interstate 70 through Kansas. Not too many shrubs grew through the pavement and there were relatively few wrecks on this route; she could use some of the speed the police special was designed for. The wind whistled through the barbed-wire zero catcher bolted to the front fender and ruffled Danny’s choppy red hair beneath her Smokey hat.

I made a mistake and I’m sorry. Can’t you just let me go? Drop me off here, I don’t mind, the prisoner said. Please. He sounded afraid. More than he’d been before.

Danny glanced in the rearview mirror: The man in the backseat couldn’t take his eyes off the apparition riding shotgun next to her. His fear was justified. They made a peculiar pair, she knew. Danny could pass for good-looking from a few feet away, but there were too many scars on her face for up-close work. Most people, however, found themselves staring at her left hand. It ended in a mess of cauliflower tissue where three fingers should have been. According to some crazy story that was going around, Danny had once chewed them off with her own teeth to get free of a wrecked car surrounded by zeroes. Mutilations were not an uncommon sight in this time, however. Almost everyone had a couple of badly healed injuries or an untreated illness. It was a world of decaying teeth, greasy hair, and crooked scars.

Even so, Danny’s companion was the eye-catching one.

It was understood among their fellow travelers that nobody was to ask about her, although Danny knew they talked about her when she wasn’t around. Underneath a stained, shapeless muumuu with big flowers on it, the woman was bound from head to foot in dirty bandages, like a cartoon mummy. She was known simply as the Leper, and she was untouchable in every sense of the word. Her presence was part of the price of being a member of the Tribe.

Water, Danny repeated, not much interested in the man’s feelings.

I don’t want it, the Leper said.

You need it. Your condition’s getting worse.

So is yours.

Danny glanced at the mirror again. The prisoner was looking at her now. If he hadn’t figured out what the Leper’s condition was, he soon would. But he seemed like a bright guy. And scared to death.

As if thinking the same thing, the Leper turned her head to face him. The bones in her neck creaked audibly. Mike could see himself reflected in her sunglasses. She took a breath, speaking through the exhalation.

We all make mistakes, she said. It’s only human.

3

The radio opened up, grainy with static. It was a call from the White Whale, the immense motor home that formed the center of the Tribe’s convoy. The voice on the radio was not Maria, but Patrick, another of Danny’s original fellow-survivors from the desperate hours after the undead first rose up in another life.

The kid’s all right, Patrick said. Nobody’s hurt. Maria’s got a shiner, that’s it. Where have you been?

Got the perp. Over.

We were calling you for the last half hour. Just so you don’t feel like you need to lecture us about communication when you get back, Patrick said.

It did cross my mind, Danny said. Remember to say ‘over’ when you’re done speaking. Over.

Can’t we pretend this is just a phone call? I really miss phone calls.

So the child was okay. The failed kidnapper had that in his favor. Danny hated to admit it—she hated to admit anything—but she didn’t have a clear answer as to what should be done with this guy. She would have to put it to a Tribe vote or something. For now, she was silent with her thoughts.

They drove on through a broken country.

It was a year and a half since the onslaught of the undead plague: Lawns had become fields, pavement was buckling and sprouting with grass and sapling trees, and everywhere there were vast swaths of scorched earth and burned-out towns where fires had raged unopposed. Cities were unapproachable, swarming with animated corpses.

In contrast to the ruined places, the Tribe would sometimes pass through deserted neighborhoods that appeared not to have suffered at all—overlook the untrimmed yards, and the houses were just as firm as the day they were built. The windows cast back reflections of the clouds, the roofs shed the weather, and the walls stood straight and clean. But here and there a front door hung open in a litter of leaves, or there was a rotten shape in the grass with one skeletal arm outflung.

The Tribe had been traversing the western states, mostly, looking for supplies and safety. Neither one lasted very long. But they had seen a great deal of the changed America along the way. Of all the ruined things they saw, it was the cars that bothered Danny the most. She’d spent a long time fighting wars overseas, and had seen ruins and fire and death. But in those foreign places, everybody took the bus or drove shabby little cars and dust-colored pickup trucks. Here, though? This was America. The cars were supposed to be bright and clean and shiny, neatly parked along streets and in driveways. To Danny, who had once owned and loved a flawless vintage cherry red Mustang, cars were a projection of who Americans were.

Now these once-prized machines were scattered all over the countryside like discarded toys, many of them smashed and broken, doors sagging open. The vehicles had become colorful tombstones marking the death of an entire civilization. And many of them sheltered the undead. It might have been some dim reptile memory of their past lives that drew the zeroes to wait there in the vehicles, dormant, their eyes and noses hung with webs of mucus. Many of them had ceased to function and were now mummified in the driver’s seats, truly dead. But others were simply biding their time, waiting like trap-door spiders for prey to come along. The dead sat in the cars and waited, and rotted, their sleepless graves made of steel.

4

No one but the scouts would have seen the child. The scouts had spent the last year looking for anything with two legs, anywhere they found it. Their eyes had become specialized, like big game hunters, like fighter pilots. They saw things differently. They saw man-shapes, no matter how well concealed.

The boy was around two hundred meters from the road, probably with a concealed bolt-hole nearby so he didn’t feel he had to run to escape. Topper saw him first, and shouted to his wingmen, Ernie and Conn, over the crackle of their big Harleys: Stander, three o’clock!

They had a system. The spotter would stop to destroy the thing if it was a zero, or make contact if it was human; the others would continue on. Commonsense precautions: no leaving the paved surface in pursuit, radio circuits to be left open. If there was a problem, the other two scouts would double back and assist. Otherwise they were backing up the primary mission—seeking safety and supplies.

Ernie and Conn kept on going. Topper swung his bike around and let the engine idle, his boots on the asphalt. It was a big, windswept nowhere, this place. There was a railway line off in the distance with a train sitting on the tracks. Just the cars, no engine, like a giant decapitated snake. Topper watched the child, and the child watched back.

Topper had personally hand-dropped hundreds of zeroes since the crisis began. He had shot them, speared them, set them on fire, hacked them to pieces with axes, machetes, shovels, and meat cleavers. He’d run them over, blown them up, and bludgeoned them into ground hamburger with anything he could lift over his head. And yet dropping the kids still bothered him. Like braining Casper the fucking man-eating Ghost, as he’d explained it to Ernie. The things had been children once, and the tragedy of it lingered. They’d never grow any taller, get zits, or fall in love. They would just drift around the countryside like toy scarecrows until they found fresh meat or rotted off their feet. Children forever, and yet never again. Topper hated them.

Usually the living shouted something right away when a scout stopped to check them out; they called for help or news or offered what they had to trade, if they had anything. This kid didn’t say a word. He had the dirty pallor of a zero, too, like sheet metal left out in the weather, and his clothes were falling off in blackened strips. Topper drew the rifle out of his saddlebag, scraped a couple of dead bugs off the barrel, and worked the action to get a round into the chamber.

The kid just stood there. Had to be a zero.

Topper sighted down the hunting scope on the rifle. It was a very nice piece of optics on a fine weapon—if you were a survivor, you could have the best of anything. The entire nation had become one vast half-ruined superstore with no employees to watch the stock. He trailed the scope along the grass and found the kid. The face jumped into view, big and clear. That always startled him. He checked the eyes, but they looked empty, like those of all zeroes. Then he saw the dog.

Holy shit, the damn kid had a dog. Some kind of little Buster Brown mutant dog with its face smashed in and no tail. Black and white with big spots. Frozen eels wriggled down Topper’s spine. Jesus, was this a zombie dog? Had the disease crossed the species line? There was talk of that, some places they’d been. If it spread to animals, that would be the end of the remnants of mankind, game over, people knew that much. He let the scope fall on the dog, his finger leaning on the trigger.

But it was clearly an ordinary dog. The ugliest one he’d seen in quite some time, but still. It was shivering and turning circles around the kid’s feet. Topper sighted on the kid again: The child bent down and put his hand on the dog’s fist-sized head. There wasn’t a zero in the world would do that. Topper let out a short breath of relief. It was a living kid after all. The only problem was, that meant Topper was probably idling his bike at the edge of a trap set by the boy’s people—men with guns hidden in the ditch, explosive booby traps, cutthroat wires stretched across the road, a tiger pit concealed in the ground somewhere in front of the child. He’d seen it all. A working vehicle, a little gas, or a bottle of aspirin—your life was worth whatever desperate survivors could take off your corpse. The zeroes were killers, but men were still murderers.

Topper waited, feeling eyes crawling over him from behind every stalk of wheat. You could hide an army in that yellow grass. But he didn’t get the sense anybody else was actually there. No sign of trampling, no broken stems or footpaths cut through the fields. Still, he wasn’t going to leave the road. Rule numero uno: Never leave the road alone. There could be fifty people hidden on that broken-down train, for example, and then bye-bye Topper.

He rested his rifle on the gas tank and switched off the engine. The sound of the other scooters was long-gone, so his voice sounded like the bang of hammers when he called out to the boy: Hey. Hey! Come on over here.

Predictably, the boy didn’t move. He’d have to be a goddamn fool to do it. Topper wasn’t a confidence-inspiring figure, even without the rifle in his hands. He was a big man clad in scuffed black leather, with a coarse, wind-scorched face surmounted by a forked black beard. In a land without laws, he still looked like an outlaw. Don’t fuck with the Topper.

He thought about the situation. They didn’t come across stray kids anymore. In the early days, there had been many, but then the zeroes got most of them, and the rest generally starved or met with accidents—or human marauders. It didn’t seem possible that this one could have survived alone all this time.

Kid, you hungry?! Topper shouted.

The boy didn’t say anything, but Topper could see the dog capering around out there, and he had an idea. Dinner, he tried. Uh, num-nums. Supper. Lunch. Breakfast. Food. The dog didn’t react, but the boy’s head tilted on its side in a doglike manner. So he could hear, at least.

Come and get it, Topper tried, and that did the trick. Every dog had a dinner call. It took off like an arrow from a bow, charging straight for Topper through the grass and looking like a skinny soccer ball with those spots. Then the animal burst out of the grass, leaped the ditch, and was springing up and down on its hind legs beside Topper like a pogo stick, whining and chirping.

Okay, okay, calm down, boy, Topper said, and fished a scrap of venison jerky out of his handlebar bag. He tossed it to the dog. Jesus Christ, you look like a goblin’s asshole, he observed.

The dog ran off a few feet and started tearing the meat to bits. Topper kept one eye on the boy during this operation, and was gratified to see the dog’s changing sides had gotten the boy to react; he was trotting toward the road, obviously afraid for the dog’s safety. Topper threw another piece of jerky on the pavement and gnawed one himself as the boy slowed down, caution setting in. Now the kid was at the edge of the tall grass. There was shorter stuff along the road, no concealment there. The boy’s eyes cut between Topper and the dog, who was valiantly wolfing down enormous chunks of the jerky, gagging on half of them.

Listen kid, I ain’t gonna hurt you or your dog, Topper said. "You saw them other guys? We got a convoy of vehicles, couple hundred folks down back the road about ten miles. We’re known as ‘the Tribe.’ I’m a scout. This is what we do. We find living people and zeroes ahead of the convoy. Look for traps and trouble. So I ain’t got any designs on you, boy, but if this here is a trap meant for me, understand I’m gonna shoot you first and your confederates after. Are we clear?"

Topper said the last part loudly, casting his voice around to the sighing grass. If some slingshot-wielding relative was lying in wait, he might think twice now. Or maybe the kid was nothing more than bait, his survival of little interest. That was the gamble.

So, you hungry? You look skinnier than a Jap’s pecker.

The boy thought about that, watching the dog eat, and at length he nodded gravely. Topper produced a good-sized chunk of jerky and threw it knife-style in the general direction of the boy. The wind caught it, and the boy had to scamper along after it, climbing down into the ditch. Topper was patient. Results were happening. He observed as the boy ripped the jerky apart and hardly chewed it, swallowing big splintery pieces of meat dry. The pup was now licking the road with an immense pink tongue. Topper threw another chunk of jerky to the dog. Then he ate another one himself. It was good quality, no seasoning except salt, but the meat had a fresh game flavor. He’d bartered half a case of bug spray for the stuff at a fortified settlement ten days ago.

My buddies should be coming back in a little while, unless they get killed. So you can think on it until then, and if you want to go tell your people about us, I’ll parlay with ’em, maybe we can do some business. Maybe they can tag along with us. That’s the deal. I ain’t got more than that to tell you.

The boy was staring at the bag with the jerky in it. Topper thought the kid might come all the way over to him now, with the taste of food still in his mouth. But he wasn’t going to grab the boy and throw him across the back of the bike. This was not a hostage situation. He’d have to wait for Danny to decide what to do, tedious as that could get.

Then something occurred to Topper.

You do got people, right?

The boy shook his head.

You ain’t got people? You can’t be alone. I don’t mean relations or whatnot. I mean . . . the others. Who’s with you?

The boy shook his head again. Not the talkative type.

"Nobody at all? You survived all this time without nobody?"

The boy extended his arm and pointed up the road with a dirt-black finger, the direction the other scouts had gone. Topper squinted at him.

This ain’t fuckin’ charades, kid. Just tell me.

The kid dangled two of his fingers and wiggled them. Legs, he meant. Walking. Now he did it with all of his fingers: several people walking. Then he made two fingers and flung them over his shoulder. He did this several times, and then finished the performance with one pair of fingers walking through the air.

Then he pointed at himself and the dog.

Topper scratched his chin through his beard. Okay, you saying there was a bunch of you and now there’s only you and that dog there?

The boy nodded again, almost a bow.

What’s that way? Topper indicated the direction the boy had pointed.

The boy bared his teeth and went into a crouch, limbs jutting, fingers hooked into claws—and for a second Topper was looking at a hunter, one of the quick zeroes that could chase down prey in packs, like wolves. It scared him a little, as if the boy had thrown off a human mask to reveal the mummified cannibal beneath. But the boy had made his point, and just as quickly, he stood upright again and the monster was gone.

Son of a bitch, Topper muttered, and got on the radio.

5

The Tribe’s convoy, some fifty vehicles and two hundred souls, was parked along the roadside between a burned-out city to the west and an area that Danny had heard from fellow travelers was crawling with zeroes. That’s where the scouts had gone. There were two ways to survive in the world: find yourself a fortress somewhere and defend it against man and zero, foraging ever farther afield for supplies, or stay perpetually on the move. The Tribe followed the latter approach. But it meant a lot more scouting. And waiting around.

Danny was the Tribe’s leader, the closest thing to an authority figure among them. The informal hierarchy was pretty simple: Danny at the top, then the scouts, then all the specialists—Dr. Amy, the cooks, Maria the radio operator, the auto mechanics, gunsmiths, and so on—and after them the chooks, or civilians, people without any particular skill who did grunt work, built fires, carried water, and stood sentry.

These days, a lot of the Tribe’s people were just sick of traveling. It came up almost daily: They envied the folk who stayed put in fortified places and only had to risk their necks on foraging expeditions. But Danny sure as hell wasn’t going to hole up somewhere and get surrounded. A number of dictators had learned that the hard way even before the crisis. The zeroes had a kind of homing instinct. They would gather from miles around, once they found a stationary group of the living. Drawn to the feast by some unknown telepathy. She was certain they communicated over long distances somehow. Black magic or pheromones, it didn’t matter.

The people who agreed with Danny’s assessment didn’t like to stop moving for more than a day or two, no matter how secure the location. If they did have to stop, they liked to be somewhere with a clear escape route and high walls. Currently, they were halted in a shitty, indefensible nowhere, the only virtue of which was the surrounding grasslands. They could see for two miles in every direction. But the water was running low, the shallow trench latrine was starting to stink, and it was time to go.

There was an argument to this effect in progress when Danny pulled the interceptor up alongside the White Whale. Raised voices dropped low when she opened her door, and fell silent as she approached. She had that effect on people.

What’s the trouble now? Danny asked, not wanting to know.

Shirleen’s got a feeling again, said Crawford, an older man with a big, grizzled mustache. The Tribe had found him holed up in a sporting goods store back in Colorado. He could do anything outdoorsy.

Remember that Shirleen is mentally ill, Danny observed. I got the kidnapper in my hold, but I don’t want anything to happen to him, you understand? He’s my prisoner.

We should hang him, Crawford said. Hang him with a sign to warn the next one comes along.

There was a great deal of anger floating around over the situation with the kids. Danny herself had to compartmentalize it; they were constantly losing children one way or another, and kidnappers weren’t strategically worse than zeroes or disease. To think so was a distraction.

He’s just a symptom, Danny said. It’s a bigger problem than that. Hang on, we need to debrief.

Danny opened the rear door and dragged the man out. Now that he was back where he’d made his attempt at kidnapping, confronting his victims, there was no defiance left in him. He was meek and afraid, his shoulders sagging. She steered him to the rear of the motor home, where there was a ladder to the roof. She took the steel handcuffs off her belt and manacled his right arm to the ladder, then cut the zip-tie binding his hands with her hunting knife.

Be right back, she said, and strode away to confer with the parents of the child who had escaped kidnapping. They needed to know the situation was officially handled.

A number of onlookers gathered around the prisoner while she had her back turned, and there was some ugly noise rising among them. Danny came back in time to overhear a couple of men making plans that would be fatal to the fucking kidnapping bastard. She needed to make her ward seem a little more human, fast, or she would have to post a guard to keep him from getting lynched.

What’s your name? she asked, loudly enough to be heard by the others.

M-Mike. Mike Patterson, the man said.

I’m Sheriff Adelman, Mike. And these here are my people. We’re one big team. We look out for each other. If I say ‘don’t kill you,’ they won’t. But if I decide you fucked up too bad to live, I don’t have to say shit. They’ll take care of business without me needing to ask. Are we clear?

You can’t just kill me. That would be murder. Mike was pale now, the gash on his brow as vivid as a torch singer’s lips.

Tell it to the judge, Danny said, and then turned to her companions. "Nobody touches him, understood? He thought he was doing himself and the kid a favor. He heard the rumor about the safe place, and somebody else stole his kid. I think the safe place is bullshit, but Mike believed it enough to risk ending up just like this here."

Crawford advanced through the crowd. He won’t be the last, Sheriff. We don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this. We need to send a message.

Danny looked at him in mild disbelief, then called his bluff, offering him her knife handle-first. Then kill him. Go ahead. I gotta take care of the Leper.

Crawford just stood there. Nobody could quite make eye contact with Danny.

Where’s Amy? she said, when she judged enough silence had gone by. Mike Patterson here’s got a broken foot. Somebody make sure she looks at it.

Danny walked away. Nobody would kill Mike now, she thought. He was human again. At the thought, her eyes slipped over to the interceptor, inside which the Leper was sitting very still.

•   •   •

Topper returned to the site before Ernie and Conn. He’d had difficulty getting radio reception, so his arrival with the kid on his bike was unexpected. As always, anxious eyes searched along the direction he’d come from, looking for the other scouts. People had a way of disappearing all the time these days. See you later, then never see you again. Topper handed the kid to Maria; she was mother hen to the small ones. Another child to fuss over might make up for the black eye.

I found this kid about ten miles along. Nobody else around. I think everybody except him got chewed and he’s all that’s left. Check this out, Topper added, and opened the fiberglass pannier on the side of his bike.

The weird little dog looked out, eyes bugging at the unaccustomed crowd of people around him. Danny had been out in the fields with the Leper, cleaning her up; they did everything at a distance for privacy’s sake. Now she was coming back, although the Leper remained where she stood in the swaying grass. People were willing to put up with her presence, but only barely. She had to stay well apart, and even then, there were always eyes on her.

Who’s this? Danny asked, when she saw the kid.

He don’t talk, Topper said.

Silent kid, huh? Danny pronounced. I like ’em that way. What the hell kind of dog is that?

It’s his, Topper said. I never seen one like it.

It’s a Boston Terrier, Amy Cutter said, coming around from behind the White Whale. Smallest of the bulldogs. A miniature breed, unlike the French or English Bulldogs, which are dwarf breeds. Mike’s foot isn’t broken, by the way; it’s sprained. Did you make the cut on his head?

Do I carry a machete?

In your car, you have one, Amy said, kneeling.

The dog seemed to know she was an ally, because he immediately hopped out of the pannier and bounced up and down in front of her.

"Well I didn’t cut him," Danny grumped. She often found herself bickering with Amy the same way they did as young girls. It was ridiculous, irritating, and comforting at the same time.

Thanks for not smashing Mike too bad, Danny, Amy said. He’s scared out of his brain.

Amy gave the dog a quick examination out of old habit, checking ears, eyes, and abdomen; although she was the Tribe’s doctor, Amy had been a veterinarian in the time before. Her straightforward brand of medicine was ideal for the life they led: She could set bones, stitch wounds, and sling antiseptic; she could do surgery in the back of a pickup truck. If somebody had cancer or a chronic illness, those were problems for God.

The dog inspected, Amy then examined the boy in much the same way: She soon determined he was suffering from ringworm and malnutrition. Amy was good with kids. They seemed to understand her better than a lot of adults did.

You sure don’t talk much, Amy said.

The silent kid said nothing.

•   •   •

Twenty minutes later, the remaining scouts came back: Ernie and Conn had gone on another thirty miles down the highway, with a detour down a southward fork that ended in a burning town they couldn’t possibly get through, unless they waited for it to burn out. It looked like Mike’s biker gang, the Vandal Reapers, had gone through that way. There were a lot of fresh corpses, some of them reanimated, the bodies hacked and shot. The Tribe could go straight on or straight back, and the rumors were true: The zeroes got real thick after mile twenty in the easterly direction.

There’s a big old truck stop about halfway, Ernie explained, mopping the grease off his spectacles with a blackened handkerchief. There’s a crossroads there, route goes north-south, but the fire closed the south end. We saw some travelers on foot, regular folk it looked like, coming the other way, but they bugged out when they saw us.

So we got this kid, Danny said. And a kidnapper. There’s zeroes to the east and fire to the south. Marauders to the north. This party never ends. Okay, she barked, turning to face the main group, we roll out at sundown, people. Let’s get to the truck stop, and then we’ll see if we can locate a route around the swarm and keep going east. If not, we backtrack three days. I’m going to do a little recon before dark. Now, can somebody figure out why the fuck our radios don’t work?

I’m on it, came a response from the crowd.

Danny turned to the silent kid, who hovered not far away, his dog at his ankle. He reminded Danny of her sister Kelley when she was that age, big-eyed and quiet, worried.

I’m gonna keep you safe, you understand? That’s a promise, she said.

By way of reply, the boy raised his arm and pointed an accusatory finger at the crooked outline of the Leper. Danny bounced her damaged hand against her thigh, framing a response.

That . . . that’s my kid sister, Danny said. Guess you figured out what’s wrong with her. She doesn’t bite, okay? I promised I’d keep you safe. She will not hurt you.

The kid lowered his arm. But like so many of the others in the Tribe, he didn’t take his eyes off the Leper, either.

6

Recon wasn’t in fact what Danny had in mind. She simply didn’t want to discuss the real nature of the mission: It was time to take the Leper on a feeding trip.

For twenty minutes Danny drove through open country, then the fringes of a settlement, slowing down when they entered a light industrial area not far from the husk of a medium-sized town. A dead end by road, but with railway lines running through it.

What are you in the mood for? Rats? Danny said, as they rolled past shuttered repair shops, auto parts distributors, and warehouses.

It’s not funny, the Leper said, drawing breath for the purpose.

You never did have a sense of humor, Kelley.

Or maybe you were never funny. Do you know what rats taste like?

They pulled up in front of a ransacked food distribution center beside the railway tracks. The place had been thoroughly trashed by survivors looking for sustenance. As much had been trampled underfoot as carried away. There was a lot of rotten garbage strewn around in front of the yawning warehouse doors.

And there were plenty of rats.

The vermin population had exploded since the outbreak. Most species except man were making a comeback, especially those that thrived on human detritus. There were millions of tons of hermetically sealed food out there, even after the better part of two years. Cheetos would be available for decades, entombed in airtight plastic. Most of all, two hundred million human corpses made a ready supply of protein. Rats and cockroaches and flies had inherited the Earth.

I hate it, Kelley said.

I ate a two-year-old candy bar the other day, Danny said. It had turned white.

No, I mean not just the rats. All of it. I’m coming apart, Danny. I’m peeling and rotting. Imagine you can’t heal. Every little scrape. She filled her lungs again. The skin on my fingers is worn almost completely off, and there’s stuff showing through underneath. My gums are just rags. I can feel parts of the bone in back—I can feel where my teeth go into the bone.

Wish it wasn’t like this, Danny said, knowing it was a feeble response.

I’m the picture of Dorian Gray.

I don’t know what that is, Danny admitted.

She waited while Kelley stepped carefully out of the interceptor. She had to move cautiously—her flesh was vulnerable.

Go somewhere else, Kelley said. The rats are afraid of the car.

Good hunting.

She was already crossing the littered street.

I’ll see you in an hour and a half or so, Danny replied. Be here, okay? Sundown is coming.

Danny watched as the bandaged woman lay down in the midst of the garbage in front of the food warehouse. The rats would smell death. They would come swarming. And Kelley would feast on them once they got too close. Danny had learned a great deal about the undead through her sister; she was one of them, a thinker, the intelligent variety.

Kelley had died in Danny’s arms and come back different from the rest of the undead. She remained the person she had been, mostly. Danny had almost blown her sister’s brains all over the farmhouse they had taken shelter in. If she had, she might have blown her own brains out, too. But Kelley had spoken. I’m still me, she’d said. And a pick of ice had been thrust down the center of Danny’s brain that was as cold and sharp today as in that moment. She would never forget the horror of that. It had been seasoned by hope, somehow. Some crazy idea that the dead might not always be lost.

But Kelley was lost. She had returned with her memories, the record of her life, intact inside her mind. Just as her body was decaying, those things that had been hers were fading by degrees. Sometimes Danny thought she should have pulled the trigger. But she hadn’t, and Kelley was now her constant responsibility. It was the price she paid for being a crappy sister, and for putting the Tribe at risk to go find her. Someday Kelley might attack Danny, or kill someone else in the Tribe. It was possible. They talked about it. But Danny didn’t think so. Kelley had made some grim calculation and decided not to eat the flesh of men. She had never wavered, at least so far.

The Tribe didn’t like it at all. Most of the small children didn’t know the truth; the name Leper had stuck because it was the only way to explain the concealing bandages. It took new people a few days to realize what Kelley was, and most of the folks who hitched a ride for a couple of days never knew how close they came to a specimen of their worst nightmares. The thinkers they’d encountered were deadly. They could use weapons, lay traps, and make complex plans. They sometimes worked with hunters, the undead who had animal-like intelligence, using them almost like dog packs; the moaners, the stupid ones, were useless to them. But the moaners also seemed to fear the thinkers, and that’s why Kelley was allowed to exist alongside the Tribe.

Moaners wouldn’t come anywhere near her. They had superb senses of smell: Even the most rotten walking corpse would have fresh-looking tissue in its sinuses. Not pink, but marbled and purple. But it was vital flesh, sometimes so enlarged it bulged out of the nostrils or the hole where the nose used to be. The ones that came shambling toward the Tribe’s halting places, though, would smell Kelley and immediately back off. Their incessant moaning would stop. They would slouch away and disappear into the landscape. The hunters were a little more persistent, and might circle a campsite all night, but they’d never come close. It was almost worth the price of having a thinker around. Almost.

This aversion to the scent of thinkers was why Danny escorted Kelley through a few tours of the perimeter wherever the Tribe had halted—the residual smell usually kept the stupider types away, as long as it wasn’t windy. It was the same reason she guided her sister away